


Defector

by celeste9



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Established Relationship, M/M, Rogue One Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 13:37:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9074311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: The picture is grainy and faded and the subject isn’t even looking towards whoever took it. A young man, maybe Poe’s age, with dark hair pulled back from his face and a short beard. Handsome, Finn thinks, even considering the poor quality of the picture. He’s got goggles pushed up on his forehead and Finn wonders if maybe he’s an old boyfriend of Poe’s, but then he squints at the emblem on the guy’s shoulder.
It looks like the old Imperial emblem.
(spoilers for Rogue One)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently I needed to begin working through my feelings about Rogue One by writing TFA fic, IDEK. It hurts me in my soul to think that the Rogue One characters aren't remembered by those who came after them, so here are people remembering them.

It’s all just junk, Poe says, when he and Finn sit cross-legged on the floor of Poe’s old bedroom on Yavin 4. Probably stuff that should have been tossed years ago, he says.

But when Finn opens a box that was stored beneath Poe’s bed, it feels like opening a door into Poe’s past, like unlocking a part of Poe that had been closed to him before. Maybe not closed, exactly, but unknowable.

Finn doesn’t have _things,_ like this. He doesn’t have mementoes of childhood, of a past life lived. For him, everything in this room is fascinating. Not only because it belonged to Poe, but because it still seems strange to imagine a life like this, where you lived in a space and built it into what you wanted and got to hold onto what you wanted, hold onto what reminded you of happy times, or sad times, or just whatever made you _you._

The box is filled with holos and pictures, mostly, a few bits of flimsi covered with Poe’s scrawled handwriting and doodles of ships. There’s an old datapad and a small model of an astromech droid that looks like Poe must have pieced it together himself, a child’s toy.

Finn thumbs through the pictures because Poe doesn’t seem to mind him doing so. He recognizes Poe’s parents, Kes when he was younger, Shara, whom Finn will never get to meet. Leia is in one, laughing, and in another Kes has his arm around Han. There’s one of two little dark-haired boys, one with Poe’s wide smile, though it’s gap-toothed, and the other - Finn puts that one away. 

There are more of Poe as a child, winning some sort of medal at school, holding his mother’s hand, sitting on his father’s shoulders, and then…

The picture is grainy and faded and the subject isn’t even looking towards whoever took it. A young man, maybe Poe’s age, with dark hair pulled back from his face and a short beard. Handsome, Finn thinks, even considering the poor quality of the picture. He’s got goggles pushed up on his forehead and Finn wonders if maybe he’s an old boyfriend of Poe’s, but then he squints at the emblem on the guy’s shoulder.

It looks like the old Imperial emblem.

“Who is this?” Finn asks, waving the picture in the air.

Poe blinks at him, focuses on the picture. He blushes.

Maybe it _is_ an old boyfriend. Though why Poe would have dated someone who wears the symbol of the Empire on his sleeve rather escapes Finn. He must have been older than Poe, too, because the picture is certainly not new, and -

“Bodhi Rook,” Poe says.

“Bodhi Rook?”

Poe holds out his hand for the picture so Finn gives it to him. Poe smiles a little when he looks at it. “He was… a hero of mine, I guess you could say. He fought in the Rebellion.”

Suddenly the symbol on his shirt makes both more and less sense. “But he’s wearing an Imperial uniform.” Maybe he’d been a spy?

Poe’s eyes lift from the picture to Finn’s face. He looks very intense. “He defected.”

“What?”

“He was a cargo pilot for the Empire but he defected. He risked his life to find the Rebel Alliance so he could pass on information integral to the destruction of the Death Star, and then he died retrieving the plans that revealed its structural weakness. He was a hero.”

Finn feels weird, like his throat is dry and tight, like his stomach is flipping over. “He defected?”

“Yeah,” Poe says, and he’s giving Finn that look, like Finn is the best thing that’s ever happened to him. “He didn’t want to serve the Empire anymore. He wanted to be better. He made a choice.”

 _He made a choice,_ Finn thinks, and he looks at the picture in Poe’s hand. Bodhi Rook.

He wasn’t the first. Somehow that feels… big, and important. There were others before him, who saw that what they were doing was wrong, wasn’t what they wanted their lives to be, and so they made a different choice.

Finn isn’t alone.

Poe had known that, when Finn had come to him on the _Finalizer._ He had been a stormtrooper, and Poe had trusted him. Maybe he’d been thinking about Bodhi Rook.

As if somehow Poe can tell what Finn was thinking, he says, “I looked up to Bodhi because he sacrificed everything to do the right thing, no matter what he’d been before. He was the pilot. He doesn’t really get talked about much, anymore, like the galaxy forgot him, forgot what he did, him and his whole team, but I never did. Leia, she… She made sure people knew but that team, they weren’t Leia and Luke and Han. They didn’t survive the war and become legends. They’re almost like footnotes but it was their sacrifice that meant we can be standing here today, free of the Empire. So I… I think it’s important we honor them.”

Finn thinks of Poe in this room, in this house, on this ranch, on Yavin 4. Poe has been breathing rebellion his entire life, even as a child in a peaceful home in a peaceful galaxy. A kid growing up with the shadows of real life heroes in his head, half a day’s trip from the Rebel base where they launched the attack on the Death Star. He thinks of Poe, the son of rebels and heroes in their own right, dreaming, hearing stories, idolizing an Imperial defector and a team of people half the galaxy’s forgotten. Finn wouldn’t have known Bodhi Rook from a stranger.

There is so much he doesn’t know. 

He’s glad he can learn. He’s glad he knows there was a man called Bodhi Rook, who gave his life to a cause he believed in because it was right.

Finn hopes that maybe he can be half as good as Bodhi Rook, one day. That will be something.

“I guess it sounds stupid,” Poe says, that blush returning to his cheeks, “but when I saw you, the first time, that’s what I thought of. Bodhi. The pilot who defected because it was--”

“The right thing to do,” Finn finishes with him.

Poe smiles. “Yeah. You were like my real life Bodhi, the dream of my childhood standing before me.”

“Except not a pilot.”

“Well, that’s what I was there for.”

“So you just liked me because I gave you flashbacks to your childhood crush,” Finn teases. “When you kissed me the first time were you imagining I was Bodhi?”

“It’s not like that!” Poe protests, and then he looks a bit sheepish, as if he’s immediately realized what he’s doing. “Okay, I accept that my extreme defensiveness looks bad.”

“He was cute,” Finn says slyly.

“Oh, whatever,” Poe says, punching Finn in the arm. “He was an amazing pilot, and he was brave, and he--”

“Had great eyes, come on, look at him. Did you have his poster on your wall? Probably a holoprojection, I bet.”

“Fuck off,” Poe says, but he grabs Finn, wrestles him onto his back on the floor.

They tussle for a while but eventually Poe settles over Finn’s hips, grinning at him, and Finn rubs his hands over Poe’s thighs. “You know one day there’s gonna be little boys keeping your picture in boxes beneath their beds, watching holoprojections of you, dreaming of being courageous pilots, thinking, man, that Poe Dameron, he was really something.”

Poe is stroking one hand through Finn’s hair. “Maybe, but there’s also gonna be little boys with pictures of Finn, the ex-stormtrooper, who was good and true and brave enough to escape, to defect, to fight for what he believed in, no matter what the galaxy tried to make him be.”

Finn slides his hands up higher, to Poe’s waist, and pulls him down. Poe goes easily, forearms on either side of Finn’s body, their chests pressed together and Poe’s warm breath on Finn’s face. “And maybe two of those little boys will meet, and they can be…” Finn stops, and he doesn’t know how to finish, because he doesn’t know how to say all that Poe has been for him, all that Poe has become for him; he doesn’t know how to express that his life wasn’t really much of a life before Poe was in it.

At least, he doesn’t know how to say that without sounding like a huge, disgusting sap, and he usually likes to let Poe take care of that side of things.

But Poe seems to know anyway, to understand, and he smiles, and he says, “That sounds nice,” and kisses him.

It does, Finn thinks.

**_End_ **


End file.
